Culture Clash Issue #286 - Personalization as an Engagement Superpower
A digital experience with a uniquely human approach
Welcome to Culture Clash. This week let’s dive into the topic of personalization.
Personalization is the action of designing or producing something to meet someone's individual requirements.
Personalization is a key component of most of today's digital experiences. It helps to engage with users and provide them with a tailored solution that meets their specific needs. Some examples include:
Amazon’s product recommendations (customer who bought X also bought Y). Otherwise known as collaborative filtering.
Spotify’s personalized playlists (Discover Weekly, Daily Mixes) based on your listening history
Stitch Fix’s clothing product recommendations based on your style needs
But what if I told you could use personalization for something more than a better utility. This idea comes alive in a year-old meditation app called Balance.
Balance dubs itself the world’s first personalized meditation audio program. I discovered Balance in March 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. At the time, I was using another excellent meditation app, Waking up. Balance immediately captured my attention. The app is well designed and features very high quality content. I decided to take the plunge.
I started using balance daily for my meditation practice. Immediately, I noticed that something felt different about the app. I was feeling very engaged and connected to Balance.
Before every meditation session (including app onboarding), Balance checks in with the user. The check in happens through a series of simple questions.
Then, Balance uses the information provided to build a personalized meditation. This meditation is directly tailored to the specific needs of the user. The personalization happens through stitching together many pre-recorded sound snippets in real time. This is genius content design
But the first 30 seconds of every meditation is where the magic happens. The app employs a technique called reflective listening.
Reflective listening is a communication strategy involving two key steps: seeking to understand a speaker's idea, then offering the idea back to the speaker, to confirm the idea has been understood correctly. It attempts to "reconstruct what the client is thinking and feeling and to relay this understanding back to the client".
Balance uses reflective listening to replicate the experience of working with a live meditation coach. The app helps a user reflect back on their needs, preferences, and goals. Through these reflections, Balance creates a level of personal connection that rivals human interaction.
The experience is also cumulative. Just like a coach or therapist who remembers the story you told them during your first session 3 months ago.
I’m surprised that this approach hasn’t gotten more attention. I think that other digital products should leverage and extend these ideas. They have the power to enable our digital experiences to feel more human.
5 links
This awesome post from Jason Fried, one of my favorite product thinker, is pure gold. Most of you have probably either asked or heard someone asking the question “How do you validate if a feature is worth building?”. Jason’s simple answer is that you can’t. You can’t get the kind of certainty that most of us would like ahead of time. Validation truly starts when your product or prototype hits the market. Well worth reading.
📱Honk
This interesting app came out a few weeks ago. It’s a messaging app where a text conversation happens synchronously while both people are using the app live. You can see all the spelling mistakes and awkward pauses in realtime. The messages are also ephemeral. They disappear as soon as you type them. It truly feels as close to talking with someone face to face but in text chat.
Midtown and Jumprope are two great product examples of our video focused future. I discovered these apps in Connie Chan’s Future of Video post. Midtown is a video focused shopping app and Jumprope is an education focused creator app for making how-to videos (engaging recipes, beauty tutorials, fitness routines) to share on social media. I don’t expect you’ll actually use these apps, but you should definitely check them out and be familiar with their paradigms.
Thanks for sharing Oz! I’m looking forward to the Android version!
I love that it uses reflective listening in the meditation session - would love to see how that works in Balance - and that it remembers what you’ve answered over time.
I wonder if there is a part where some of the information can be captured without necessarily asking - especially when it comes to contextual information. Phones can tell a lot about my location, my schedule, etc…Thanks to this info and the checkins over time, the app might learn about my context too (how it might affects my), and perhaps anticipate my anxiety before i.e. my work deadline, so to act on it/prepare for it before I even realize I’ll need to address it.
I've always been a huge proponent of personalization and customization in design, but have been pretty disappointed in seeing how it manifests itself in product the vast majority of the time. This feels like a particularly empathetic application, ensuring that the user feels heard, understood, and catered to in a fairly-invisible manner that's actually meaningful to their everyday experience.
To pull this off, it seems like a modular approach would need to be taken from the ground-up, from a design, content, and architecture perspective to ensure that the app remains lean and focused in on what matters to the relevant user-set. But a very interesting exercise for an existing app could be a "relevancy audit" to discover how much of the current experience and content is relevant for each user persona, then working backward to discover how different experiences in the app could potentially be decoupled to show only the most relevant to each user journey.